1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to natural language processing.
2. Description of Related Art
Natural language contains various types of ambiguity. Human recipients of natural language easily resolve these ambiguities. However, when natural language is used as an interface to machines and devices, ambiguity can create problems. In particular, when human generated speech is used to control computer applications through a natural language interface, natural language ambiguity complicates the design of the interface.
Some researchers have attempted to add additional information resources to conventional automatic speech recognition systems to aid in resolving these ambiguities. For example, some conventional systems use facts and other world knowledge to resolve natural language ambiguity based on the communicative content of the speech. Unfortunately, knowledge based resolution mechanisms tend to be computationally expensive and difficult to implement in dynamic and/or interactive environments.
User's of natural language interfaces do not typically intend to inject ambiguity into the speech. Rather, the ambiguity results from the variety of user, genre and topic-specific ambiguity resolution mechanisms used by human speech recipients. Some researchers have attempted to create natural language user interfaces that use the explicit communicative content of speech information to determine the speaker's intention. Since these conventional systems depend on the speech content, they are limited to resolving ambiguity based on the dialogue context.